This week: I revisit a few topics, and bring them together. Some of this was talked about in Issue no. 1, and issue no. 3. But this time, I’m diving deeper. Let’s roll!

There is a watch on my wrist that is older than it has any right to look.

The Omega Seamaster has been there for most of my adult life, a graduation gift from a time when I was still figuring out what adulthood meant, which is to say it arrived before I had any real answers and has stuck around while I accumulated a few. The case has been polished exactly once, by a watchmaker who did not ask before he did it, and I have not forgiven him. The dial has shifted slightly over two decades, the kind of change you cannot point to in a photograph but know is there when you hold it in direct light. The lume plots have aged from stark white to something closer to aged ivory. The bracelet has a stretch to it now. It is, by most objective measures, a less perfect object than it was in 2001.

I think about that word, perfect, and what it actually means for something that lives in the real world. Because the Seamaster is not less. It is more specific. It is more itself. And the process responsible for that is one that most people spend considerable energy and money trying to prevent.

Oxidation. The slow, patient chemistry of things becoming something other than what they were.

Oxidation is, on its surface, a straightforward villain. It ruins iron. It clouds glass. It turns a half-finished bottle of single malt flat and astringent if you leave it long enough. It is the reason your brake rotors look alarming after a week of rain, the reason you run a cloth over a watch case before photographing it, the reason your grandfather's car needed a frame-off restoration that cost more than the car is worth.

But here is the thing about oxidation that collectors understand, often without being able to articulate it: the battle is not against oxidation itself. It is about the rate. The surface. The material. The conditions. Controlled decay is not a contradiction in terms. It is, in many cases, the entire point.

The chemistry is not complicated in principle. Oxidation is the loss of electrons from a molecule, typically driven by reaction with oxygen or another oxidizing agent [1]. At the atomic level, it is one of the most fundamental processes in nature, underlying everything from cellular respiration to the rusting of a bridge. The results range from catastrophic structural failure in unprotected steel, where iron oxide forms a flaking, porous layer that accelerates further corrosion [2], to the most complex flavor compounds in a Speyside whisky. What determines which side of that spectrum you land on is almost entirely a matter of context. The same process that destroys unprotected steel produces the thing collectors call patina. The same process that flattens an open bottle of cheap blended Scotch produces the ester complexity in a twenty-year-old cask. Understanding the difference between oxidation as destruction and oxidation as transformation is, in a meaningful way, the hidden curriculum of every serious collecting hobby.

Whisky is, at its core, a product of controlled oxidation across time.

The distillate that comes off the still is clear, harsh, and relatively simple. It is ethanol and water and a dense population of congeners, some desirable, most not yet fully formed. What happens over the following decade or two is a slow negotiation between spirit, wood, and atmosphere. The barrel breathes. Oxygen permeates the stave at a rate estimated at between one and three milliliters of oxygen per liter of spirit per year in standard oak casks, enough to catalyze significant chemical change over time without overwhelming the spirit [3]. The char layer inside the cask acts as a filter and a catalyst simultaneously, adsorbing sulfurous compounds while contributing vanillin, tannin, and lactones from the wood itself [4]. Esters develop. The sharp edges of new make spirit round off. Color migrates from the wood into the liquid. Up to 70 percent of the flavor in a mature Scotch whisky is estimated to derive from cask interaction rather than distillation [5].

In Scotland, the warehousing matters in ways that are difficult to quantify but impossible to ignore. The temperature swings between seasons are modest compared to bourbon country, where summer warehouse temperatures can exceed 40 degrees Celsius and drive rapid extraction from the wood [6]. In Scotland, the moderation of climate is precisely why Scotch takes longer and, the argument goes, develops more subtlety. The spirit expands into the wood in the mild summer warmth, contracts and pulls back in the damp of a Scottish winter. Over and over, for years, the wood gives something up and takes something back. It is less a manufacturing process than a long, slow conversation.

Benromach, in Speyside, makes this feel unusually visible. It is a small distillery, the smallest in the region when Gordon and MacPhail restored it to production in 1998 after it had lain silent for fifteen years [7]. The warehousing there has an intimacy that larger operations have traded away for efficiency. The spirit ages in a way that reflects its environment. On my last visit, standing in one of the low dunnage warehouses with casks stacked three high and the smell of wood and spirit so thick you could almost chew it, I understood something about patience that no tasting note has ever fully communicated. The oxidation there is not an accident to be managed but a relationship to be maintained.

For a more confrontational version of the same philosophy, look to Springbank in Campbeltown, one of the few distilleries in Scotland that still malts, distills, matures, and bottles entirely on site [8]. Springbank takes the position that terroir, the full environmental context of a place, is not a marketing concept but a chemical reality. The damp salt air off Campbeltown Loch moves through those warehouses. It is in the whisky. The oxidation happening inside those casks is specific to that place in a way that a centralized maturation facility in a business park outside Edinburgh simply cannot replicate, regardless of how good the wood program is.

You do not rush it. You do not open it before it is ready. You accept that the thing you will eventually pour is not the thing that went into the barrel, and you are glad for the difference.

The watch community has an uncomfortable relationship with the word patina.

On one hand, a naturally aged tropical dial, where the lacquer has shifted from black to a warm brown through decades of UV exposure and humidity, can add five figures to a watch's value at auction. On the other hand, a scratched bezel or a worn lug is a defect. The line between desirable aging and undesirable damage is drawn somewhere, but nobody agrees exactly where, and the disagreement is usually financial in nature.

Set the market aside for a moment. What is actually happening when a watch ages well?

Brass oxidizes in ambient conditions to form a stable cuprous oxide layer that, unlike iron rust, does not propagate destructively into the underlying metal [9]. This is why a brass case component can survive decades without structural compromise even as its surface shifts in color and character. Radium lume, used in watch dials through the 1960s before safety concerns ended its use, undergoes radioactive alpha decay with a half-life of approximately 1,600 years, which means the quantity of radium in a vintage dial is essentially unchanged, but the surrounding material has been slowly altered by decades of low-level radiation [10]. The cream color collectors prize is partly a function of that alteration in the surrounding lacquer and substrate. Gilt printing on vintage dials shifts register as the lacquer yellows and the underlying brass warms, producing a depth that modern printing cannot replicate regardless of budget. The steel of a case develops micro-scratches that, in aggregate, produce a matte surface texture measurably different from the factory finish [11]. These are not the results of neglect. They are the results of a life lived.

My Seamaster is not a vintage piece. It is not going to develop a tropical dial or radium patina. But it is developing something, quietly and without my permission, in the way that all real objects develop character when they are actually used. There is a difference between a watch that has been worn and one that has been stored. The worn one is more interesting, even when the stored one is more perfect. Perhaps especially then.

I think sometimes about the version of that watch that exists in some parallel timeline, kept in its box, never polished by a well-meaning watchmaker, preserved in exactly the condition it left the factory in 2001. It would be in better shape. It would also be less mine. The Seamaster I have is marked by time the way I am marked by time, imperfectly, specifically, in ways that are not always flattering but are at least honest.

There is something almost melancholy in that, if you let yourself sit with it. The thing you love is changing. You cannot stop it. The only question is whether the change is happening in conditions that produce something worth having.

Cast iron brake rotors are designed to rust.

This is a fact that unsettles people the first time they hear it, particularly people who have just bought a car they care about. A thin layer of iron oxide on a rotor surface is not a problem. It is, in a narrow technical sense, a feature. Iron oxide provides a harder surface layer than the underlying gray iron, and the layer is mechanically removed and re-formed constantly during normal braking [12]. The car that has sat for a week in a damp garage stops perfectly well once you have scrubbed the rotors clean on the first run down the driveway. This is not a design flaw. It is the material doing exactly what it was chosen to do.

The more interesting version of this is what happens inside an engine over time.

A new engine is a collection of surfaces that have never met each other under load. The cylinder walls, piston rings, bearing journals, and valve seats all carry microscopic surface irregularities from the machining process. During break-in, those surfaces wear against each other under controlled conditions, establishing the contact geometry that will define how the engine seals and moves for the rest of its life [13]. The process involves both mechanical wear and tribochemical reactions, where heat and pressure cause the lubricant and metal surfaces to react, forming protective boundary films that reduce friction and wear over time [14]. It is, at the molecular level, a controlled oxidation and adhesion process. The engine that exists at ten thousand miles is chemically and dimensionally different from the engine that left the factory. In most cases, it runs better for it.

I have some personal data on this subject.

My 2014 Subaru WRX has had a few engines. Not a few owners. Three engines. The EJ255 is a turbocharged boxer-four with a well-documented enthusiasm for throwing connecting rods when it gets too hot, too lean, or too ambitious on the boost, all conditions that can coexist peacefully in a modified car until suddenly they do not [15]. I have replaced that engine twice under circumstances I will generously describe as educational, and once under circumstances that were simply expensive. The current engine, which I treat with considerably more respect than its predecessors, is in a state I would characterize as productively broken-in. It has earned its miles. I have earned my caution.

What those three engines taught me, other than humility and the phone number of a good machine shop, is that an engine is not a static object that wears down from a known starting point. It is a dynamic system that is always in the process of becoming something. The oil oxidizes under heat and begins to form deposits if it is not changed. The seals harden as the plasticizers migrate out of the rubber over years of thermal cycling [16]. The bearing surfaces develop a patina of their own, a tribological record of every cold start, every hard pull, every oil change skipped a few hundred miles too long. You can read an engine's history in its condition, the same way you can read a barrel's history in the whisky it produced, or a case's history in the watch it has been protecting.

There is a version of collecting that is about preservation. Keeping things in their boxes. Storing bottles in the dark. Garaged miles and climate-controlled cellars. I understand the impulse. I do not entirely trust it.

The objects worth having are the ones that have been used for what they were made for. A whisky that has never been opened is not a whisky. It is a promise of a whisky, and promises are not the same as the thing itself. A watch that has never been worn is a machine that has never been allowed to do its work. A car that has never been driven hard, on a road that required something of it, is a sculpture that happens to have an engine. Or, in my case, has had several.

Oxidation, in the end, is just time made visible. It is the record of everything that has happened to an object, written in the language of chemistry on every surface. The goal is not to prevent it. The goal is to create conditions where the record being written is one worth reading. Benromach figured this out in a damp warehouse in Forres. Springbank figured it out on a peninsula that the rest of Scotland largely forgot about. The copper in a pot still knows it instinctively, having been doing this particular job longer than most institutions have existed [17].

The Seamaster on my wrist is a document. It says something about where I have been and what I was doing while I was there. Some of those places were better than others. Some of those years were harder than others. The watch does not make the distinction. It just keeps the record, imperfectly and patiently, the way all good things do.

Thank you again, as always. Next week we are back with reviews and news! Also, got something fun in the works. Hopefully I’ll have it out in the next couple weeks! Have a wonderful long weekend. Pour something fun. Wear something interesting. Drive something fun.

-Mark

[1] Atkins, P. and de Paula, J. Physical Chemistry, 10th ed. Oxford University Press, 2014. Chapter 7: Chemical Equilibrium; oxidation defined as electron loss in redox reactions.

[2] Evans, U.R. The Corrosion and Oxidation of Metals. Edward Arnold, 1960. Foundational text on the propagating, porous nature of iron oxide (rust) versus protective oxide layers in non-ferrous metals.

[3] Canas, B.J. et al. "Oxygen transfer through oak wood and synthetic closures in wine and spirit maturation." American Journal of Enology and Viticulture, 2012. Oxygen ingress rates in standard oak casks estimated between 1-3 mL/L/year.

[4] Mosedale, J.R. and Puech, J-L. "Wood maturation of distilled beverages." Trends in Food Science and Technology, 9(3), 1998. Comprehensive review of vanillin, tannin, and lactone contribution from cask char layers during spirit maturation.

[5] Singleton, V.L. "Maturation of wines and spirits: comparisons, facts, and hypotheses." American Journal of Enology and Viticulture, 46(1), 1995. The commonly cited figure that up to 70 percent of mature whisky flavor derives from cask interaction originates in this and related works in the oenological literature.

[6] Nettleton, J.A. The Manufacture of Whisky and Plain Brandy. J. and J. Gray, 1913. Historical reference; comparative climate data for Scotch versus American whisky maturation conditions discussed extensively in modern distillery literature, including Cowdery, C. Bourbon, Strange. 2014.

[7] Gordon and MacPhail. "Benromach Distillery: History." benromach.com. Accessed 2026. Restoration to production confirmed 1998 following 15 years of silence after closure in 1983.

[8] Springbank Distillery. "About Springbank." springbank.scot. Accessed 2026. One of the last fully vertically integrated distilleries in Scotland, conducting all production stages on a single site in Campbeltown.

[9] Pourbaix, M. Atlas of Electrochemical Equilibria in Aqueous Solutions. NACE International, 1974. Cuprous and cupric oxide stability under ambient conditions; distinction from the propagating corrosion behavior of iron oxides.

[10] Murray, A.S. and Aitken, M.J. "Radium content and alpha particle irradiation of luminescent materials." Ancient TL, 1988. Radium-226 half-life of 1,600 years confirmed; implications for long-term stability in vintage luminescent materials.

[11] Hutchings, I.M. and Shipway, P. Tribology: Friction and Wear of Engineering Materials, 2nd ed. Elsevier, 2017. Surface texture and micro-scratch development under sliding contact; measurable changes in surface roughness Ra values.

[12] Eriksson, M. et al. "Wear and contact conditions of brake pads: dynamical in situ studies of pad on rotor." Tribology International, 35(3), 2002. Iron oxide formation and removal cycle on gray cast iron rotors under normal braking conditions.

[13] Taylor, C.F. The Internal Combustion Engine in Theory and Practice, Vol. 2. MIT Press, 1985. Break-in processes, surface conformance, and the development of stable running clearances in engine components.

[14] Spikes, H. "The history and mechanisms of ZDDP." Tribology Letters, 17(3), 2004. Tribochemical film formation in engine lubricants, including boundary lubrication reactions and protective layer development on metal surfaces.

[15] Subaru EJ engine technical service bulletins and community documentation, 2008-2014. The EJ255 connecting rod bearing failure mode under sustained high-load and detonation conditions is extensively documented in both factory technical literature and the Subaru performance community.

[16] Bhowmick, A.K. and Stephens, H.L. (eds.) Handbook of Elastomers, 2nd ed. Marcel Dekker, 2001. Plasticizer migration and elastomer hardening under thermal cycling; long-term seal degradation mechanisms in engine applications.

[17] Forbes, R.J. A Short History of the Art of Distillation. E.J. Brill, 1948. Copper's role in distillation traced from early alembic design; the metal's reactivity with sulfur compounds has been understood and exploited for centuries.